Regional Plenum Quo vadis, Balkan? in Sarajevo: Russia and the European Populist Right – Can the Region Escape Russia’s Orbit of Influence?
The fifth Regional Plenum Quo vadis, Balkan? is being held in Sarajevo from June 6 to 8, and, as every year, it will gather a large number of experts, officials, organizations, academic and state institutions, decision-makers, as well as representatives of the media, diplomatic delegations, and the academic community.
This year, the partner of the Regional Academy for Democratic Development from Novi Sad and the Center for Civic Education from Podgorica in organizing the Plenum is the Faculty of Political Sciences at the University of Sarajevo, and it is realized with the support of the European Fund for the Balkans. The Regional Plenum Quo vadis, Balkan? is one of the most significant regional initiatives that brings together prominent civil society organizations, experts, and activists dealing with the topics of democracy, reconciliation, and regional cooperation.
The fifth panel at this year’s plenum was dedicated to the relationship between Russia and the European populist right. The speakers on the panel were Ljubomir Filipović, political scientist from Montenegro, Prof. Dr. Sead Turčalo, Dean of the Faculty of Political Sciences in Sarajevo, Dr. Milivoj Bešlin, historian at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory from Belgrade, and Dr. Harun Karčić, political analyst and journalist from Bosnia and Herzegovina. The panel was moderated by Prof. Dr. Valida Repovac Nikšić from the Faculty of Political Sciences at the University of Sarajevo.
Ljubomir Filipović assessed that Russia’s influence in the Western Balkans has intensified recently and that it reaches far back into history. He stated that three pillars of this policy were defined long ago – Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia lost its ideological foundation for its idea in a multipolar world.
Sead Turčalo said that it is evident that Russia, through its political discourse, is creating a new reality and that Putin has excellently aligned his narrative with radical right-wing groups in Europe who were disillusioned with liberal democracy. Since 2006, Russia has deliberately begun supporting certain radical right-wing groups in Europe to influence European politics, offering alternative media, and the primary goal of Russia was to disrupt the liberal-democratic consensus in Europe through this approach to specific groups. He noted that this approach required time, resources, and various investments in Western Europe, but in the Western Balkans, this approach required none of these. He emphasized that the region is unique in the sense that Russian influence cannot be analyzed in individual countries but only as a whole, which has allowed Russia to more easily spread its influence.
Milivoj Bešlin said that delving into the dominant narrative of Russia and Serbia would be an important lesson for Europe and that Europe should listen more to its neighbors and critical thinking within these countries. He reminded that when the West did not recognize the danger coming from Vladimir Putin, no one in Europe listened to the warnings coming from countries neighboring Russia, and many remembered it twenty years later when it became obvious that they had been right all along. Speaking about the historical parallels between Russia and Serbia, he first mentioned the state as the ultimate value and the constant attempts to create a state without society and the aspiration to create complete congruence between the state and society. Today, Russia is on the verge of achieving this goal and forcibly equating society with the state. He reminded that in Russian history, the thesis that the state is always older and more important than any individual is well-known, and this is also a characteristic of Serbian and Russian ruling ideology, which implies territorial expansion without any internal development and modernization. The third parallel is the “liberation” argument that exists in our region since the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, implying that Russia or Serbia have moral superiority and the right to rule over neighboring states. Another common narrative is the sense of threat, where our countries are surrounded by enemies, and because of this, they must take measures to protect themselves, with all neighboring states having limited sovereignty. Another common feature is the protection of their people outside their borders, a narrative introduced by Slobodan Milošević. This is the argument Putin completely repeated during the aggression on Ukraine and the pressures on Moldova. The West, of course, is seen extremely negatively in all state ideologies of Russia and Serbia. There is also a narrative of exceptionalism, which in the Russian-Serbian case implies that these countries have their own path, that they must develop in a way opposite to the West and with opposite goals. This creates the concept of the Russian or Serbian world. Another common feature is the church as the guardian of identity and the instrumentalization of the church for political and ideological purposes. The church becomes the center of expansion and aggression, demarcating the space that needs to be occupied. The concept of a party state with one dominant party is another common feature, as is the absence of pluralism and the organic understanding of the people as a whole, where any attempt at pluralization is seen as an attempt to divide. Another shared characteristic is the absence of the separation of powers, as well as violence as a method of governance, pronounced centralism where every complexity of the state is seen as separatism and weakness. State economy instead of market economy, criticism of the government is seen as an attack on the state and is considered subversive, traitorous, and foreign. Historical revisionism is a method that is abused in both societies, and many of these patterns have been adopted by the European populist right from Russia and applied in the European context.
